NOTE: This blog gives a "behind the scenes look" at the progress of the RadeonHD driver's development. As such, its contents reflect the state of the development version of the driver, and not the state of the publicly released version.

Version 2.4 of the driver was announced and released a while ago, so this post is on the late side. In fact, I almost forgot to write it (I did the work for this release a while ago). However, adding composited video is a major milestone so this development log wouldn't be complete without at least mentioning it.

Yes, it's official; the AmigaOS 4.x Radeon HD driver is no longer in beta. As announced in A-EON Technology's press release, version 1.0 has been released. This milestone marks the end of years of hard work and extensive testing.

I'm pleased to announce (together with A-EON Technology) that the RadeonHD driver for AmigaOS 4.x now fully supports the Radeon HD 7000 series (Southern Islands chipsets). Full 2D acceleration including compositing has been implemented. This is another major milestone as the driver now supports the very latest graphics cards in the Radeon HD range. You can't get newer or more cutting edge than that. The RadeonHD_RM.resource also supports the 7000 series (a necessity for 2D acceleration too), which means that this latest series is also ready for its 3D drivers. This completes everything that was planned for version 1 of the driver.

The news is already all over the AmigaOS community; with funding from A-Eon Technology, I'm pleased to deliver 2D support for Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series cards. Support for the Radeon HD 7000 series is also in the works. This is probably the biggest milestone yet in the RadeonHD driver project.

If you've been keeping up-to-date with AmigaOS news, you have no doubt heard that AmigaONE X1000 First Contact machines are now shipping to customers, and that Sam460ex owners (including people with AmigaOne 500s) have received an updated RadeonHD driver. Both groups are using version 0.32 of the RadeonHD.chip driver. This marks another milestone; one that I like to call, fully working 2D.

A while ago I mentioned the RadeonHD_RM.resource, and said that I'd give more details later. Several posts to this development log have come since, without a mention about this resource. Today, I'm going to deliver those details, and provide a glimpse of what is still to come.

I am pleased to announce that compositing for R5xx based cards (Radeon X1000 series) is now done. This marks a major milestone in the development of the RadeonHD.chip driver. Namely, full 2D graphics acceleration is implemented for an entire series of graphics cards. The screenshot below shows Workbench with compositing effects enabled being displayed by a Radeon X1550 graphics card. As you can see, the errors that were present in the previous screenshot are now gone (the development log entry containing the previous screenshot is included in the image below for comparison).

Hardware acceleration of 2D blitter operations for R5xx chipsets (Radeon X1000 series cards) was completed last with the exception of blitting patterns. This is another milestone in the development of the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4.x graphics driver. Blitting patterns was left out because it is a less frequently used operation that cannot be performed efficiently by the R5xx's 2D acceleration hardware. Instead, it would require using the R5xx's 3D capabilities. This will be added later, after hardware compositing is added (which also uses the 3D capabilities).

Solid rectangles are now rendered by the graphics card, instead of by the CPU. This is the first hardware accelerated operation implemented in the RadeonHD driver (for Amiga OS 4.x). The increase in speed can be seen in benchmarks made using the P96Speed utility (specifically, the RectFill() benchmark):